Away from Damascus

When the wind threw your dress off the clothesline The building opposite shuddered For he saw our house window naked

When the shell destroyed the building nobody trembled

We need to giggle In order to conceal our rattles under the rubble

We need to dwell among websites So we do not see the tons of vacuum around us

Every time we wake up we wonder: When and how did we go to sleep?

II

We walk on electric wires in the gray morning Our members are dispersed between two tongues Between countries of exile and our exiled homeland Between the teeth of darkness and the fruits of light Between hell’s weddings and the black wheat

We are the people of the in-between We consume conversations Like a spoiled child takes a bite from each apple

We have incomplete poems Incomplete death And orderly chaos Our flowers neither bloom nor wither— We are the children of the digital age

Whenever we look at the sky We only see with half a glance

Like a young crow balling on the grass Like a dove devoured by hunger Next to the crow a fountain surrounded by lion heads Carved from imagination— We only see half a life

III

Dew on wounds from a grenade defused by a child Dew from the tears of hell Loitering in this paradise that floats on the remains of the alphabet

The young man is in the garden of exile And his vanishing country floats like a voice coming from a well

The heart of the exile is a black hole arching the lights of the world A hole on the verge of the Big Bang

Do Not Tell Anyone

I

Do you remember our childhood fighting game? What’s happened is that we’ve entered the screen And God has taken our place

II

Between the wide front lines The sniper lens stops A victim falls apart in my heart

III

The father who spreads his hand Is covering the sun So it won’t get burned by the face of a dead child

IV

As we cross the borders Fleeing from live bullets Do not tell anyone that we are alive

In the Foreign Land

We said goodbye to the war at the city gates, And left bags of destruction with the guardian of nothingness. Our clothes are stained with dawn And tears of joy. We crossed the bridges of loneliness, And the shells of words are still in our pockets. Beacons wave for us from the shores of injuries, And the mountain feasts run in our arteries.

O friends of mud and light, This city is for us alone; For us as well are streets filled with nothing but the trace of our breaths on the snow. We removed the walls of time and we crossed, We swapped guns for the wheat of the East, And the gold of the desert for the desert dew.

As if we went back to the house of first love, We poured the wine of beginnings in our names, And opened our hearts for the sea. Here, in the foreign land, There is nothing but the bareness of our being And the windmills.

Omar Youssef Souleimane’s Away from Damascus is a meditation on war and exile that is deepened by distance and the hindsight it allows in relating this painful experience. Indeed, Away from Damascus offers a timeless reflection on war, the ensuing condition of exile, and their paradoxically devastating and enlightening effects. These poems relate the experience of living in a foreign country as a refugee, away from one's family and social milieu; these poems are at once visceral and philosophical, immediate and poetic, vulnerable and meditative.

Souleimane is no stranger to life in exile. As a child he lived in Saudi Arabia, where he endured marginalization in Saudi society. Having experienced the exclusionary practices of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, Souleimane developed a strong animosity toward religious extremism, a force that has also been playing a significant role in the Syrian war. Hence, he has acquired a unique perspective, equally detached from each of the fighting sides in the Syrian war, which has enabled him, as a journalist, to offer a counter-narrative to the dominant accounts of this war. The value of his poetry, however, is not limited to his distinct viewpoint. His poems are a testament to a remarkable creative capacity, nurtured by the years he has spent in exile.

The eighty-five poems of Away from Damascus relate the experience of war and exile; how a war interrupts one’s dreams, and how it severs their relation to their surroundings. It is undeniable that exile offers the war survivor the opportunity to renew their ties to the world through a new beginning, but this beginning is marred by challenges, painful memories, and an uncertain future. In these times of widespread violence and refugee crises, I have tried to bring to the Anglophone reader the immediacy of the condition of exile by translating Souleimane’s gripping poems.

Omar Youssef Souleimane is a poet and journalist, born in 1987 in al-Qutayfah, Syria. He studied Arabic literature in the Al-Baath University of Homs. He published The Songs of Seasons in 2006, Aghmed aïni wa amchi (I Close My Eyes and I Walk Away), granted the Souad al-Sabah Kuwaiti prize for poetry in 2011, and in 2013 la yanbaghi an yamoutou (In No Case Should They Die). In 2014, he published another book of poetry in French and Arabic, La mort ne séduit pas les ivrognes (Drunkards Are Not Seduced by Death), in Paris. In 2016, he published Loin de Damas (Away from Damascus), a bilingual poetry collection in French and Arabic in Paris. His novel, Le petit terroriste, will be published by Flammarion in September 2017. In 2013, French film director Elvina Attali shot a short film about his poems entitled Je ne suis plus personne (I’m No Longer Anyone). He left Syria because of the war, and has lived in Paris since 2012.

Ghada Mourad is a Ph.D. candidate in comparative literature and a Schaeffer fellow in literary translation at the University of California, Irvine. She translates from Arabic and French. Her translations and translation reviews have appeared in Jadaliyya, The Literary Review, The Common, Denver Quarterly, Banipal, The Missing Slate, Al-Jadid, ArteEast, A Gathering of the Tribes, among others.